Alien: Blackout is a mobile game, unfortunately

Keep Amanda Ripley and her crew alive, but only on your phone.

Alien: Blackout is a mobile game where you manage Amanda Ripley and her crew while they’re trapped on a space station. There, best to rip the plaster off quickly. After the trademark appeared and Hideo Kojima and Geoff Keighley seemed to be teasing it just before The Game Awards, some of us—definitely me—may have gotten our hopes up, but it looks like we’ll just have to go back to Alien Isolation. That’ll teach us.

Blackout sticks Ripley Jr. and her crew on a Weyland-Yutani space station where—shocker—there’s a xenomorph hanging around. Players will make “perilous choices”, according to the official site, while guiding the survivors through tasks using only the station’s emergency systems.

I actually quite like the idea of helping the crew from a control room instead of dealing with the xenomorph directly, especially since we’ve already seen the first-person horror done so well. The cameras, a map and a motion tracker are all you’ve got. But I also envision lots of fiddly tapping on maps and tiny buttons, which I definitely don't have the patience for any more.

There is that other new Alien game in the works, however, which we still don't know much about. It's a shooter being developed by Cold Iron Studios and will launch on PC and consoles.